News tagged with plastic material

Autopsies of dead puffins collected from the Isle of May in Scotland have revealed that, along with their usual diet of sand eels, these charismatic seabirds have been eating plastic pellets, known as nurdles.

Electronic devices have shrunk rapidly in the past decades, but most remain as stiff as the same sort of devices were in the 1950s—a drawback if you want to wrap your phone around your wrist when you go ...

Imagine printing out molecules that can respond to their surroundings. A research project at the University of Washington merges custom chemistry and 3-D printing. Scientists created a bone-shaped plastic ...

Synthetic materials are convenient in many respects, but they have one disadvantage: they are permeable to gases. In order to make plastic more impervious, Ruhr-Universität engineers apply wafer-thin layers on surfaces. ...

Lower-cost 3D printers for the consumer market offer only a limited selection of plastic materials, while industrial additive manufacturing (AM) machines can print parts made of high-performance metals. The ...

Bottled water sold in Spain is practically free of constituents given off by plastic packaging or glass bottle lids. They are only detected in some cases, albeit in quantities much lower than limits found ...

Specialized windshield glass, everyday plastic water bottles, and countless other products are based on ethylene, a simple two-carbon molecule, which requires an energy-intense separation process to pluck ...

"From whales to wellies, syringes to cigarette butts and fishing lines to fridges – it's all been found around the Forth. But not many locals realise they are sharing their beach with nurdles." So says ...

Environmentally compatible production methods for organic solar cells from novel materials are in the focus of "MatHero". The new project coordinated by Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) aims at making ...

European scientists are experimenting with bacteria and algae and turn them into bioplastic factories. Their vision: these microorganisms should produce a large portion of our plastic materials without any petroleum.

Insulation materials of tomorrow must be both efficient and environmentally friendly. Fraunhofer scientists are developing insulation foam made from wood that could re- place petrochemical plastics in the ...

Once the snow melts, Canada's bee population will be back in business—pollinating, making honey and keeping busy doing bee things. For at least two urban bee species, that means making nests out of plastic waste.